Re: Dr. James Cooke Brown

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 05:12 PM 02/19/2000 -0600, Steven Belknap wrote:
> >The weakness of the close-comma in vowel pairs is that
> >linguistically it introduces a semi-vowel. (Lo,is -> /lowis/). By
> >devoicing the glide and maintaining the airflow to prevent a
> >word-ending glottal stop or pause, which we mark with the apostrophe
> >instead of the close-comma, the glide tends to sound more like an
> >"h" (/lohis/), which is why I teach the two marks together in
> >explaining why Lojban apostrophe is not really "h".
> >
> >lojbab
>
>But the alternative orthography does equate <h> with <'>, no?

No, the orthography designed to backfit to the TLI system uses no separator 
where TLI currently pronounces a vowel pair as 2 syllables, and a close 
comma where there is ambiguity between diphthong and disyllable. In other 
words, we collapse the voicing/devoicing of glides into a single symbol, 
the close-comma, since the normal use of a close comma in Lojban is not 
actually significant (i.e. la loi,os. and la lo,ios. are differently 
syllabified, but are considered the same word just like short and long 
forms of lujvo are considered the same word. This is because 
syllabification is sometimes (usually?) an ease of pronunciation preference 
depending on the native language.

mi'e lojbab (lo,jbab = loj,bab)

----
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)